Outrage Grows Over Starvation in Gaza, and a Mysterious Pentagon Budget Line

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0:34From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, July 28th. Here's what we're covering.

0:45For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of systematically stealing aid provided by the United Nations in Gaza and used that as its main justification for limiting how much food is allowed into the territory. But the Times has now learned that Israel never found any proof of that. Two senior Israeli military officials and other Israelis the Times talked with said the UN program had been largely effective and that there was no coordinated theft of its supplies. Despite that, Israel went around the UN and set up a contentious new system of aid delivery earlier this year, run in part by American contractors.

1:25Almost 1 ,100 people have been killed under that system, according to Gaza officials, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fire on them while they rushed to get food. At the same time, more and more people have gone hungry. The UN says that almost a third of Gazans are having to go multiple days without eating. And dozens of Palestinians have starved to death in the past month, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Facing growing international outrage over the crisis, Israel announced this weekend that it will pause some of its military operations in certain areas of Gaza for part of each day to allow more food in.

2:03It's still far short of what many aid groups and even many of Israel's allies say is necessary. But Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has forcefully rejected that criticism. There is no starvation in Gaza, no policy of starvation in Gaza. And I assure you that we'll continue to fight, that we achieve the release of our hostages and the destruction of Hamas's military and governing capabilities. They shall be there no more. Meanwhile, major global news organizations, including The New York Times, are warning that local journalists inside Gaza are trapped without enough food to continue their work or even to survive.

2:46A director of the Committee to Protect Journalists accused Israel of, quote, starving Gazan journalists into silence. And on Friday, a group of news organizations that includes The Washington Post and The Guardian issued a statement calling on the Israeli government to let local journalists in Gaza leave to recover and allow others to enter to continue reporting on the war.

3:15So we have good news. We've reached a deal. It's a good deal for everybody. I believe. After weeks of tense and unpredictable trade negotiations, the U.S. and the European Union have reached an agreement. We have a trade deal between the two largest economies in the world. And it's a big deal. It's a huge deal. Altogether, the U.S. imports more goods from the EU than from anywhere else in the world. Under the new agreement, those products will face 15 percent tariffs. That's far less than what Trump had initially threatened when he rolled out his tariff plan, but the rate is still roughly five times higher than when he took office.

3:57The Bloc of Nations also agreed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on American energy and significantly boost its investment in the U.S. When it comes to the significance of this deal, I think it's really important to remember that it's more of a framework or more of a blueprint than an actual deal. My colleague Gina Smiley covers the EU. She says that like many of the trade deals President Trump has announced recently. This one is short on details. That said, the deal could potentially avoid a pretty painful trade war between the European Union and the United States. We know that the EU had prepared a big retaliatory package of products that they were willing to hit with higher tariffs if they didn't reach some kind of deal with the U.S.

4:38What we could have been looking at here is really sort of a blow-for-blow trade war where the European Union applied higher tariffs and the U.S. applied higher tariffs, and maybe that just escalated out of control. And so I think what we're really seeing here is an agreement not to escalate a situation that could have gotten pretty ugly on both sides of the Atlantic.

5:03The Times has been looking into a mysterious transfer of federal funds that could be hiding the cost of renovating the plane that the Qatari government gave the U.S. as a gift. President Trump said he was excited to get the luxury 747 earlier this year, brushing off widespread ethics concerns and saying that only a, quote, stupid person wouldn't take it. The plan is to use it for Air Force One, then transfer it to the Trump presidential library after he leaves office. But before it can go into service, it needs, by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars of security upgrades, including clearing out any surveillance devices that U.S.

5:41officials think may be hidden inside. The price tag for all of that has been classified. But some people watching the congressional budget closely have narrowed in on a mystery$934 million transfer from another Pentagon project, specifically the effort to modernize America's aging nuclear infrastructure. That project is already way over budget and behind schedule. Now, some of its funds may be going to the plane. though the Air Force said it cannot discuss that or anything else on the topic because, again, it's classified. The alleged accounting maneuver has drawn criticism from at least one lawmaker.

6:17Senator Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, has accused the administration of diverting money meant to shore up the country's nuclear capabilities. She said, quote, We're weakening our credibility to fund a vanity project for President Trump.

6:40This pest is not a hypothetical threat. It is real and advancing closer to Texas every day. In the southern U.S., ranchers and officials at the Agriculture Department are raising the alarm about a parasite that could upend the beef industry. It's the New World screwworm. A screwworm infection can kill a cow within two weeks. This pest does not recognize fences or borders. If we wait, we lose. Cattle farmers and officials are concerned because a new wave of the parasite is migrating up from South America, in part because of warm weather patterns and the illegal transport of some livestock. It's now been detected less than 400 miles from the Texas border.

7:20There is a way to contain screwworm. The U.S. has nearly eradicated it in the past. Scientists can breed and release hundreds of millions of sterile male screwworm flies to basically cut off reproduction. But experts say the federal government is currently unprepared for a full-scale outbreak. If it does reach the U.S., it could do to the meat market what bird flu did to egg prices, driving them up and up. Beef prices already hit record highs earlier this year, in part because of drought and the high cost of feed. In President Trump's ongoing trade war with Brazil, the world's largest beef exporter could also push prices higher.

8:06And finally. On the outskirts of Xinyi, a small city in southwestern China, there's a wide open field. And in the distance, you see this kind of crazy structure rising from the middle of the grass. It looks kind of like a pyramid, but made out of wood. It's really spindly. It has all of these ropes and cords stretching from the top all the way to the ground, almost like it's trying to keep it from collapsing or from flying away. My colleague Vivian Wong recently traveled to see what's become an unlikely mini-tourist attraction in China. It's a house the Chinese government wants torn down, but the owner has just kept making it taller and taller.

8:49It now has 11 floors. Vivian says it started as an act of defiance. The government was going to raise the whole village to make way for a development. In those cases, compensation gets calculated based on house size. So the idea was to add more and more square footage. But as Chen Tianming kept building this house, it really became, in his words, an art project and sort of a passion project. I was following him up every floor, climbing hand over foot very carefully. On one floor, he had a reading nook where he had just stacks and stacks of old books. On another floor, he had this really kind of beautiful open-air tea room, and you could sit and look out over the fields.

9:34The house is especially striking at night because last year, the Chen family actually wrapped the whole structure in basically Christmas lights. And so at night, in this open field where all the other villagers have moved away, it's just this tall 11-story structure twinkling with these rainbow-colored lights. On the one hand, Chen's house is just kind of this quirky project that he's built. But on the other hand, it's actually really representative of the broader trend of Chinese development in the past few decades, which is that the government has cleared whole villages away to try to build new apartment complexes, shopping centers, what have you.

10:14And most of the time, the villagers don't really have a choice in whether they relocate or not. But Chen is a part of a pretty small group of people sort of all across the country who have decided to try to put up a fight. And that can be really difficult. I would say that most of the time those people don't actually succeed. And so Chen's house is really special, not just for how crazy it looks, but also in that to this point he has actually managed to hold out and keep his house.

10:44Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gotten some major food companies to agree to phase out a very common but controversial ingredient. That's next in The New York Times audio app, where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.